[67King]

Was introduced to this site by a customer. Very cool, excited to have found it.

Okay, that other perspective thing. I'm not a hypermiler. My garage would probably make many here cringe (old cars, race cars, big cars.....but diesels, manual trannies, and smaller displacement turbos galore, so not all lost causes). That's not to say I'm not interested in the subject matter, quite the opposite. I now co-own the NA importer/distributor for a line of premium automotive oils which includes an energy efficient line (don't want to run afoul of the intent of Terms & Conditions so I'll refrain from elaborating).

Before that, I did engine development for Ford. As everyone here knows, the engine is but one part of the picture. But fuel economy was becoming paramount when I was nearing the end of my tenure there. So I became very intrigued, and agitated when many things happened (e.g. the three times in 7 years a small displacement diesel for half ton truck type applications was started and halted). My projects were focused on complexity reduction, power improvement, cost reduction, and fuel economy improvement. So I have a bit of background on the engine side of things.

At any rate, I was a bit of an outspoken person at Ford. Really wanted for Ford to take a more proactive approach on many things. I honestly felt that the general market would be best served by a combination of diesels and hybrids, with very few straight-up gasoline cars. I've also been a huge proponent of endurance racing (LeMans), because it had the three big critical things all in one - power, durability, and fuel economy.

So again, different perspective. Really more of a collective view rather than the individual view. But as the engineers here will attest, we all disdain waste. The racer in me wants to remove friction because it frees up horsepower. Also want to clean up the aero of the car (within rules) so I can run an underpowered but lighter car and not give up too much top end to other guys. The consumer in me wants better mileage. The former OEM engineer in me wants to take those changes and put them in production at a million units per year for a serious force multiplier.

Some of the things we played with were trying to increase compression ratio as much as possible (noting too much will necessitate retarding ignition which will decrease FE), different types of VCT systems, friction reducing technologies from roller bearing valvetrain components to things that would allow smaller oil pumps, etc. One of the bigger challenges was reducing the idle speed of the trucks down to 600 RPM. We eventually got it done, but when accounting for production variability in all of the inputs, it is more challenging than one would expect on the surface. But again, the little things times a million add up!!!